The housekeeper who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault apparently lied on her asylum application at the behest of a smuggler, a “notario,” or some other person. She may have had no valid claim for asylum. Or she may have poisoned a valid claim by embellishing it. Some people who have good claims for asylum exaggerate them or substitute concocted facts, either because well-meaning relatives or mercenary non-lawyer advisers never learn the truth of the asylum seeker’s claim or because although they know the true story, they do not know the law well enough to realize that the real facts may qualify the applicant for asylum.

In the asylum law clinic that I direct, several clients who had not previously been represented by lawyers initially told us stories that were partly false. After law students talked to them for hours and investigated their stories by telephoning witnesses in their home countries, these clients admitted that they were coached to tell a partly untrue story. In some cases (particularly those in which our clients were raped or brutally tortured), the applicant’s coach never knew the true story, because the client was ashamed to tell his or her relatives what had happened during a political imprisonment.

In other cases, a coach erroneously believed that the true story would not warrant asylum. With the client’s help, our law students have sorted out the true from the false and concluded that the true elements of the claim were good enough to present to an immigration judge. In most such cases, the judge agreed and granted asylum, especially when the client confessed to having exaggerated elements in the written asylum application and explained the circumstances. But when we concluded there were no arguably valid claims, we advised the clients that we could not take their cases to court.

Current U.S. law prohibits the government from giving free legal counseling to indigent asylum seekers, even though they will be ordered deported if they lose. Reversing this ban would not only be fair to low-income asylum applicants with complex but valid cases. It would also provide skilled advisers who would help to deter fraudulent applicants from pressing their claims.